The America’s Cup is the pre-eminent international spectacle of boatmanship, so why should the attendant architecture remain landlocked and ground-based? Urban regeneration doesn’t happ
en through a pair of binoculars. OO.
Embracing the same desire for radical innovation as that evident in the Emirates Team NZ boat, our stage for watching sailing refreshes nautical spectatorship. This is the Royal NZ Yacht Squadron leading the development of naval architecture. By re-cycling an offshore platform, NZ once again demonstrates global innovation through a sustainable yet memorable ‘grandstand-on-the sea’ experience! Fuller ferries dock onto Pirelli pontoons, leading you to glazed elevators that rise up through hotel panoramas, liquid bars, kiwi seafood eateries, and, of course, a helipad for those that come in ‘heels’.
The location of the #ACC36 Platform is floated. Anchor nearer the Rangitoto or closer to the City of Sails? Either way we can triangulate the televised backdrop. Gin palaces frame the course. NZ, oil well and truly, on the world map. After ACC is Auckland City Council in the American Cup Class.

Eureka! The moment in a creative process when you realise your onto something good (but also recognise the epiphany is attendant with may problems)… and realise you need to get the idea down. Speed of design thought is best done with a sketch but sometimes lines are just not enough. The 8 bit weak render allows one to forego resolution for conceptualisation.
In architecture, unlike say mathematics, there is no absolute answer. Sqm x £ = 🙂 But the conditions remain: geographic, physical, social, economic, environmental, aesthetic. If an architectural project could be so exquisitely defined as a polynomial defining these indeterminates, who knows what the implcations could be for living?

Fake News is not only about the click bait of deliberate misinformation. Fake News, in Architecture, can be truthful News about Fake Things.
The RIBA’s Code of Professional Conduct first principle relates to Integrity: Members shall act with honesty and integrity at all times. This professional requirement for honesty has transformed into a desire for material expression also not to tell porkies. The truth to materials is a tenet of modern architecture and holds that any material should be used where it is most appropriate and its nature should not be hidden. With this in mind the ‘brick slip’ is a fake brick upheld by manufacturers and, therefore increasingly, architects as it gives the material illusion of brick but not the ‘hassle’ of weight or need for detailing knowledge. This has lead to modern brick wallpaper facades, the currency of contemporary London housing. Planners, after all, loved brick. Easy on the eye, brick offers a non-confrontational public consultation. If correctly chosen and detailed, brick degrades arguably better than other other material. The brick slip is, as leading brick manufacturer Vandersanden declare, fake: the Fake News here is that its use is no longer giving the planners the slip but is being increasingly written out of planning consents.

Given London property prices, many have left this city for another country (Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels… ). Tourism NZ’s advertising cry of the 1980s was: “don’t leave home until you have seen the country”. In 2017 the real estate picture has changed so dramatically that this now means, for many NZ ex-pats, you can no longer afford to call that country your home. According to NewsHub:
“It’s official – New Zealand has the most unaffordable housing in the world, according to The Economist.

“Across five different measures, New Zealand has come out on top of three of the five measures for the most expensive global housing market. New Zealand has had the highest rise in house prices, costs the most against the average person’s income and now has the biggest difference between house prices and renting prices. In the latest edition of The Economist, figures show that in the past 46 years New Zealand’s house prices have risen by more than 8 percent on average a year.
It’s a trend repeated among other first world countries, including the United Kingdom, which had a 7.65 percent average rise annually over the same timeframe, and Australia, where house prices rose more than 6.4 percent a year on average. According to The Economist, those numbers have remained solid in the past seven years with New Zealand’s numbers showing a 7.9 percent consistent increase per year since 2009.The Economist puts this trend down to “a growing horde of rich foreigners” coming to New Zealand because they see it as a “safe haven”. “In 2016 overseas investors bought just 3 percent of all properties. But their purchases were concentrated at the expensive end of the market, which is growing fast: sales involving homes worth more than NZ$1m increased by 21 percent.”
The findings don’t get any better for New Zealanders, showing that in the last 10 years, the average price against a person’s income has risen dramatically. The numbers are backed up by the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey released in January showing Auckland is ranked the forth least-affordable housing market in the world. The average house price in Auckland is now more than £500K.”

#SpendItLikePeckham is the hashtag for a project where the architect spending, is to put her money money where her, blablablarchitecture, mouth is. So #SpendItLikePeckham leads the architect-developer to aspire to design their own brand of spatial economics. Case in point: how to design something of interest yet in accordance with Approved Document K: Protection From Falling. The White Picket Fence Balustrade? The History of My White Picket Fence begins with Dennis Hopper’s House in Santa Monica… TBC

The Peckham Project has three leading facades: two leaning in at 5 and 30 degrees, one leaning out at 20 degrees. This presents a technical issue for the window fabricators (air and water egress according to Velfac…) which lead us to the renovation of the John Hancock Centres’s observation deck which leans out 30 degrees to afford the viewer a vertiginous outlook of Chicago from 450m above ground level. In the video, the guy in the white shirt looks less enthralled…